Social Computing CSC 495 and CSC 555 Munindar P. Singh, Professor - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Social Computing CSC 495 and CSC 555 Munindar P. Singh, Professor singh@ncsu.edu Department of Computer Science North Carolina State University Fall 2016 Munindar P. Singh (NCSU) Social Computing Fall 2016 1

Mechanics ◮ Scope ◮ Grading ◮ Policies ◮ Especially, academic integrity ◮ Don’t help; don’t take help; don’t collude Munindar P. Singh (NCSU) Social Computing Fall 2016 2

Scope of this Course ◮ Directed at computer science students ◮ Addresses social computing, not merely uses of it ◮ Emphasizes concepts and theory ◮ Involves tools in assignments ◮ Requires a moderate amount of work ◮ Fairly easy if you don’t let things slip Munindar P. Singh (NCSU) Social Computing Fall 2016 3

Challenges of Social Computing Social Computing Computing of or with social relationships ◮ Let’s think of some examples Munindar P. Singh (NCSU) Social Computing Fall 2016 4

Challenges of Social Computing Putting the “Social” into Social Computing ◮ Principals ◮ Autonomous parties (people, organizations) ◮ Accountable ◮ Social relationships ◮ Social state: snapshot of set of social relationships ◮ Social computing: computing the social state ◮ Operating a social machine ◮ Specifying a social machine ◮ Conceptual modeling of the specification Munindar P. Singh (NCSU) Social Computing Fall 2016 5

Challenges of Social Computing A Sampling of Approaches Platform Problem Key Feature Google Ranking search results Hyperlinking Amazon Help users in product selection Reviews, comments, ratings Netflix Recommend movies to users User profiles, ratings KickStarter Select fundable projects Projects, rewards, backing Wikipedia Create a free encyclopedia Revision history, talk Twitter Find tweets on a topic Common hash tags Facebook Services for apps Social network Quora Find information on something Questions and answers Reddit Select top stories Feeds, posts, comments reCAPTCHA Recognize text in images User-provided content ESP game Determine photo content User-provided photo captions Blogger.com Support conversations Feeds, posts, comments, tags LinuxQuestions.org Forum to resolve issues Threads Gmail Facilitate communication Conversations, contacts Mechanical Turk Perform tasks Market, HIT Who . . . Millionaire? Answering questions Voting Iowa Elec. Markets Predict election outcomes Market Munindar P. Singh (NCSU) Social Computing Fall 2016 6

Challenges of Social Computing Dimensions of Variation Models of problems vis ` a vis architectures of solutions ◮ Who may initiate a computation? ◮ Who selects the participants? ◮ Are the parties interested in the outcome? ◮ Do the parties interact repeatedly? ◮ Do the parties learn and might useful outcomes emerge? ◮ Is it a majority or a minority game? ◮ How do participants interact with each other and with requesters? ◮ Can a coalition be formed? ◮ Is the nature of the work negotiable? ◮ How is the service engagement governed? ◮ Are the results produced continually? Munindar P. Singh (NCSU) Social Computing Fall 2016 7

Challenges of Social Computing Scoping Social Computing Think of the above-mentioned dimensions and propose additional dimensions Classify (some of) the samples according to these dimensions Munindar P. Singh (NCSU) Social Computing Fall 2016 8

Challenges of Social Computing Motivation for this Course Achieving the promise of social computing ◮ Computer science is a game of abstractions ◮ Need new abstractions for social computing ◮ Incorporate human-level abstractions ◮ Elicit problems more precisely ◮ Grant more flexibility to participants ◮ Obtain a clearer accountability of actions ◮ Hold work to higher standards of norms and ethics Main technical consequence: how can we accommodate the various forms of social interaction as a basis for computing Munindar P. Singh (NCSU) Social Computing Fall 2016 9